Which Tax Bracket Benefited Most from the Trump Tax Cut?

Justin Fox wrote in February 2021 for Bloomberg about recent data he obtained concerning the year 2018 in federal taxes.

This data refers specifically to the Alternative Minimum Tax, and changes that the Trump administration made to the Alternative Minimum Tax. These tax cuts were included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

These cuts were advertised as gifts to the middle class. Who gained from these cuts, and by how much?

Two particular tax brackets gained the most from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The slivers of the population whose adjusted gross income was between $200,000 and $1,000,000 gained the most from their 2018 federal taxes.

Another data set from the I.R.S. splits taxpayers into percentiles. To be specific, it slices U.S. taxpayers into 100 groups. The percentile group that benefited the most? The 98^th. In 2018, the 98^th percentile referred to households that had an adjusted gross income between $359,000 and $540,000.

According to Jim Tankersley of the New York Times, that 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will be difficult for the Biden administration to roll back.

That Act was estimated to cost the U.S. government coffers nearly $2 trillion over ten years. Biden had announced that he would eliminate these tax cuts.

However, it looks so far like Biden will be constrained from removing those cuts. No tax increases of any kind arrived in the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan he released in mid-January. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that Biden would not reverse any piece of the tax “until later in the recovery.”